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Watch an origami robot assemble itself and walk away

But inspired by its complex folding mechanisms, researchers are reappropriating the craft to create reconfigurable robots that are able to fold themselves into arbitrary shapes.

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A team of researchers at MIT and Harvard have been working on combining electrical engineering and origami since way back in 2010, but have now reached what MIT has described as a "milestone" in its work. Assembled almost entirely from components made by a laser cutter, the latest robot can fold itself up and scuttle away when batteries are attached.

These automatons have the potential to penetrate collapsed buildings and then assemble themselves into a form in which they can properly function. It takes only four minutes for the robot to fold itself up, after which it can walk away with no human intervention. Details of its construction have been published in the journal Science, and according to the study it demonstrates "the potential both for complex self-folding machines and autonomous, self-controlled assembly".

In order to construct such a robot the researchers have had to employ the use of metamaterials, which possess properties that cannot be found in nature due to the fact they have been artificially engineered. The metamaterial can be folded into a tessellated pattern of unit cells, and the cells are from there able to switch back and forth between soft and stiff states. It has been engineered from five layers of materials. The outer layers are shape-memory polymers that can fold when heated. Inside these are layers of paper and in the middle is a layer of copper that has been etched into an intricate network of electrical leads.

The other components consist very simply of two motors to control the robot's four legs, a microcontroller and a flexible electronic circuit board that contains the batteries. Each of the robots hinges are preprogrammed with features that tell it how far to fold along each line.

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to a set of recipes to assemble this structure, then press a button and it builds itself and walks away," says Robert J Wood from the Wyss Institute and Harvard, who was one of the authors of the study (emphasis our own).

The primary challenge the researchers see themselves as solving is the ability to manufacture robots cheaply and quickly, but they are also very much aiming to create a robot capable of doing something useful. They can see it being deployed in all sorts of harsh or exotic environments including space, battlefields, search and rescue scenarios.